Credit and Debit Card Processing Services

The Vendor is required to provide payment processing services to include credit and debit cards and other types of electronic payments for fees assessed by the county office and other county departments.
- Provide processing for multiple “brands” and types of cards at no cost to the County.
- The “brands” include, but are not limited to, MasterCard, Visa, Discover, American Express, Venmo, PayPal, Samsung Pay, Google Pay, and Apple Pay.  
- All payment brands must be funded in the same timeframe at no additional cost.
- Provide electronic check transaction processing, electronic debit card processing and electronic funds transfer processing.
- Provide an internet and interactive voice response (IVR) payment processing system for county (County).
- Provide information that shows that the contractor has adequate controls and safeguards in place when the contractor hosts or processes data belonging to county customers.
- transfer daily deposits electronically to multiple, separate County bank accounts on the day of transaction or within one (1) business day as directed by the customer.  
- Must also be able to process transactions and accept settlement files as required.
- All transactions shall be processed in real time.  Within twenty-four (24) hours of authorization, the payments must be submitted to the ACH (Automatic Clearing House) for processing and must be electronically deposited via ACH in the gross amount (i.e. in their entirety) directly into the County’s designated bank account.  The system shall ensure that the County’s account cannot be debited if there is a negative balance at the close of the business day.
- Deposits must be segregated per entity with individual identifiers.  The County must be able to see each department’s deposits as its own line item rather than being integrated into one deposit.
- The Contractor’s payment processing system must be available for use by customers twenty-four (24) hours a day, seven (7) days a week. 
- On-line and phone transactions from customers must allow for alpha-numeric character entry as well as international addresses.
- Provide for the authorization and settlement of transactions through the appropriate authorization and settlement networks and provide problem resolution to transaction and/or settlement discrepancies within two (2) business days.
- electronic payment service must maintain quality controls to minimize the occurrence of unintended duplicate payment transactions by customers, while allowing for customers to submit multiple intended payments.
- A “shopping cart” feature shall be provided to allow citizens to make multiple payments to the same department with a single transaction.  
- Payment processing system shall have capability to flag transactions that exceed a predefined threshold of suspicious activity, and generate an alert for County administrators to review.
- Payment processing system shall display payment pages and transaction receipts in the users’ preferred language.  It is required that the payment processing system include a Spanish language option to both the payment pages and transaction receipts.
- Payment processing system shall include features for processing chargebacks, and generate a notification of a chargeback to County administrators for review.
- County administrators must authorize any refund requests initiated by customers.
- Payment processing system shall not charge the end customer if a communication error occurs with any downstream system.
- Payment processing system shall have E-check verification capability.  E-check verification must verify that an account is active and that the account has funds available.  All E-check and ACH transactions shall undergo pre-posting validation in the same manner as credit card transactions.  Transactions that cannot immediately be validated must be flagged as pending and forwarded to downstream systems.
- Payment processing system is preferred to have capability to accept international transactions, and provide E-check/ACH processing capabilities for transactions involving country banks and/or other financial institutions.
- Provide training to department personnel at no cost as related to payment and credit/debit processing requirements (i.e. procedures for handling retrieval requests, charge backs, accessing reports and transaction data, upgrades to programs or machines, and/or other processes and procedures which may be required).
- The Contractor must supply an online payment gateway application programming interface (API) for integration into custom code projects, including but not limited to mobile development, web development, and desktop integrations. The Contractor must also supply individual and customizable webpages to process unique transaction types for each County department.
- Payment processing system should integrate with accela using the official accela Web API.  It is preferred to not employ the legacy HTTP-POST payment adapter.

- Contract Period/Term: 1 year
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: October 06, 2025